Leader coach

Forces:

• Business conditions, markets and technologies were now changing even more rapidly than in the past.
• Successful companies are now those in which people learn new skills and habits from each other, and in which managers and leaders are also coaches.
• Companies with a coaching culture do exist, and are much more fun and rewarding to work there.
• Excellent organizations focus more on bringing out their people’s potential in order to retain their best performers.
• Training has to be continuous and ‘on the job’—tha is, by coaching.
• Pressures to achieve cause people to slip back into some bad old habits.

A new breed of leader is called for—a breed with a broader repertoire of management styles:

• sometimes ‘hands-on’ and sometimes ‘hands-off’, as suits the occasion;
• delegates appropriately;
• believes that:
  1. if you invest just ten minutes in coaching someone who reports to you, it will later save you an hour; and
  2. you also help yourself when you help others to perform more strongly;
  3. a curious coach is more effective than ‘coaching by telling’.

Sources

• The Tao of Coaching by Max Landsberg